Eimear Marrinan & Meaghan Williams – How to create an equitable and inclusive culture that transcends physical walls

It's my pleasure to introduce Eimear and Meaghan from HubSpot, Eimear is the Director of Culture and Meaghan is the Remote Work and Inclusion Program Manager. Their session is entitled How to Create an Equitable and Inclusive Culture That Transcends Physical Walls. Building an inclusive remote culture requires intentionality, and there's no better duo to share what it takes than these two.

I'm here, Meaghan. Thanks for sharing your genius with us. Take it away.

Hi, everybody. We are so excited to be here today, virtually to present at the GitLab Commit conference to introduce myself, I am Eimear Marrinan, Director of Culture at HubSpot. And I'm Meaghan Williams.

Remote Work and Inclusion Program Manager at HubSpot. And over the next 10 minutes or so, we will be walking through something that is really close to both of our hearts and that is culture and more specifically, how to create a culture that transcends physical space, something that couldn't be more relevant and timely. So first of all, what is culture?

Well, culture has about as many definitions as the number of people who have defined us in general. When people think about culture, especially in the tech world, the images that come to mind are often of free coffee, nap rooms and pool tables. If that's the case, then what happens when you take away the physical?

Over the last six months, organizations have been challenged to define their culture without being tied to a physical location. What are you left with when the ping pong table is dissembles on the candy, walls are empty? So to answer that question, we were forced to go back to basics to remind ourselves what culture actually is and what it isn't.

So at its simplest form, we believe culture is who we are and who we aspire to be, it isn't linked to the physical like the images on the previous slides. It's our personality, the values and beliefs that are fundamental to our organization. What that actually means is that culture informs who gets promoted and rewards her decisions get made and how the company grows better together.

You know, your company culture is working and people understand how they're empowered to behave in a tough situation to solve for the customer or help the company grow without having to read a handbook or ask their manager. Good culture is contagious and inspires people to make great autonomous decisions at scale. HubSpots Culture Code is our guide to a successful culture, and we share it with the world so that employees, candidates, customers prospects know the type of company we aspire to be, both as strong as our culture code is as we think about the future of work.

Like every other company, we're faced with a challenge. How do we make a conscious effort to review our culture and make sure it evolves to truly transcend physical boundaries, is inclusive and enables everyone to succeed regardless of location. And with that, I'm going to pass you over to my colleague, Meaghan.

Thanks Eimear. To give a bit of context on our history with remote work HubSpot has remote employees since the earliest days of the business, but in recent years our remote population has significantly increased from just a handful of folks to over four hundred employees globally. That represents about 10 percent of our population.

These employees are dispersed throughout nine different countries and nearly all 50 states within the US. In twenty nineteen, Mirel was created in order to help support and scale this growing remote population. And when I first started in this role, one of the main pieces of feedback I heard from the population was that while working remotely had plenty of benefits, it can be challenging to be like you fully belong in the larger community.

With that in mind, one of my first goals was to ensure that as a company we were creating a remote, inclusive culture and everything from our processes to our programming. Next, I'll walk you through the key areas that we focused on to create a remote, inclusive culture at HubSpot. First, in order to create an inclusive culture, we started with the mindset that everyone is responsible for creating and supporting an inclusive environment in a hybrid company, it can be easy for folks to feel like they don't need to think about remote inclusion if they don't have a remote employee on their team.

But as our co-founder Dharmesh stated at Inbound last year, remote employees should not be thought of as a different category. Remote employees are employees and remote people are just people. Promote inclusion isn't just beneficial for remote folks, either, it can be beneficial for interacting with colleagues in other offices, individuals who may work from home from time to time, and for supporting multiple learning styles.

At HubSpot, we think of remote inclusion as a career skill, and we encourage all employees to assume a hybrid environment at all times and learn the best practices to support those environments. Next, we leaned into technology to support our inclusion efforts. One of the largest concerns we hear about virtual collaboration and communication is that it can be challenging to feel like it's the real thing.

But Virtual doesn't have to be in quotation marks. If you have the right technology to support your employees at HubSpot, our teams leverage Slack, Zoom, Captiva Whiteboards, Google Docs, LOSSA Chart and many more in order to help us communicate and collaborate with our employees across the globe. And we provide training to all employees on how to use this technology so that every employee defaults to remote, inclusive practices instead of adjusting after the fact.

Now, when it comes to technology, it's essential for us to have a solutions based mindset. So instead of getting stuck at wondering if something can be done virtually, we start with the assumption that it can be done and then we work on the house. Admittedly, this has led to some missteps and awkward moments along the way.

Just ask us about our first time trying remote yoga. But with every attempt, we made our way towards a more remote, inclusive culture and environment. Last, with a growing remote population enabling career growth was essential to creating an inclusive culture.

One of the core tenets of HubSpots culture is the ability for our employees to always be growing and grow their careers. But if you're only hiring remote employees for one type of role or only hiring at the entry level, you're creating a ceiling on career growth of your remote employees and excluding them from a core component of company culture. C.

all the way up to BP, but this didn't happen by chance and it certainly didn't happen overnight in order to enable career growth for remote employees. We focused on three main areas. First, we facilitated cross-functional networking through monthly mixers, remote inclusive events, employee resource groups, local community events and channels.

Next, we work to ensure that performance was measured by output, not input, giving remote employees an equal chance to shine with their enormous counterparts. Finally, we provided managers and leaders with remote management training so that every team is prepared to create a remote, inclusive environment from the beginning. As our remote population has grown, HubSpot has leverage these best practices to create a culture that is inclusive to our remote employees, wherever they may be.

But the challenge with focusing on inclusion is that it implies that there's one dominant population flexing to include another. Inclusion doesn't necessarily mean equality. And while our work over the past few years has led us in the right direction, our next step moving forward will be to shift from remote, inclusive to remote first.

And we'll talk about how we're thinking about that shift next. Awesome, thanks, Meaghan. So at a recent panel discussion that we had, which actually included Darren Murph from GitLab, he introduced us to the difference between allowing remote and truly supporting and enabling remote.

And on this vein, as we transitioned into being a fully remote workforce, as Meaghan just said, we were challenged to do just that take what we had learned from our remote community over the past 10 years and apply these lessons in order, as Meaghan said, to adapt our processes, our systems and our culture to fit this new normal and truly supports remote versus just or and truly supports on remote versus simply allowing us. So what are some of the things that we did and will continue to do to enable that shift? Well, first, we need to go back to basics, identify so identify the bodies of your culture when it is not tied to an office.

Do these bodies change? Are they still relevant? And if not, start their measure?

One of the ways we are doing this is measuring our culture. Measuring culture is hard, however fundamental, to understanding how culture is evolving, how culture is being activated amongst your employees, and making sure it's evolving in the right way. You can measure culture in many different ways testing behaviors, decisions and practices.

Just recently, for example, we included a number of simple questions into hotspots and survey testing the behaviors and values that our employees display and see displayed on a regular basis to understand if these values are still relevant or need to be tweaked, which is so important, especially in this remote world and in a world where we can't celebrate culture via the traditional in office experiences, we have to create moments to engage with those behaviors and values. To do this, we're thinking about culture in the context of the entire employee lifecycle. For example, what is the messaging and words we want our recruiters to use when engaging with our candidates?

What are some of the actionable ways for our new hires to engage with our culture? How do we infuse cultural behaviors into the way we think about performance management? And once you leave HubSpot, how do we actively engage with you to make sure you want to return?

And our ultimate advertisers remember behaviors and values. The core to your culture aren't driven by racists. Next, creating a culture that is equitable to everyone that's making sense.

And some of the ways we were thinking about this is, first of all, making sure we are removing any of the spices that may exist in our processes. So training our managers uninclusive behaviors, rethinking the way our teens interact. For example, if you even have one employee working remotely, take your team meeting from your desk to avoid any in-person side conversations.

Any benefits going forward that supports our culture has to be office agnostic, doubling down on our ERGs and DIB efforts to make sure we're creating brave spaces for all our employees to share. Then location agnostic collaboration, the way we collaborate and communicate our core foundations of any successful culture. And in a world where we have to think beyond in-person techniques for how we do this.

Having a powerful knowledge management system, as GitLab well knows, is incredibly important. We need to write everything down, create playbooks for what we can, and be transparent and intentional in how and when we communicate and collaborate. We have to wipe away the assumption that anyone knows anything, saying things out loud as managers instead of assuming.

And finally, all of our in office employee experiences are all of our employee experiences in general. They have to move from a remote friendly world to a remote first world, focusing on people over location. Everything we do has to sell for the virtual experience first and then solve for physical meeting spaces on an in-person experience.

The seconds, for example, we can't simply copy and paste what we would do in the office building. A zoom link. We need to adjust our experiences to engage everybody in our culture and foster a more connected global community.

And if we're planning something that is better suited for an in-person experience and it can't be replicated virtually, then we need to rethink our plans. We, of course, also need to be creative and think outside the box and create experiences that is accessible to everybody, which includes a mix of team experiences, self-paced learnings and larger global events. So I know that was a loss.

So we may think super simple by recapping everything on this one slide. Screen grab this, guys. We're sharing our slides so you can definitely take this.

This is literally your action plan. For today on how to create your culture that transcends physical space. Thank you and thank you all so much for joining us.

We hope that our relatives are helpful to you wherever you may be in your journey towards creating a remote first culture. And we look forward to learning more from all of you and get it.